A philosopher and the author of Creating the Palestinian State and Graceful Simplicity, Jerome Segal offers this fresh and vigorous reexamination of the oldest part of the Bible, which was written as much as a thousand years before the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. Taken out of the context imposed by Christianity much later, the first six books—the Hexateuch—are a brilliant, sophisticated, and highly cohesive account of the human condition. Segal argues that the Bible reads like an existential novel about the struggle between God and mankind, and is far more sympathetic to mankind than to God.